Picking a license

[Aahz]

[we have previously been using "MIT-style" and "BSD-style" licensing in
this thread for the most part -- given the poster who suggested that
Apache makes more sense these days, I'm switching to that terminology]

In article <99386b28-1636-4f81-beec-3756970d37e8 at 11g2000prv.googlegroups.com>,
Carl Banks  <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
>source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
>open source licenses.

That I completely disagree with.  I'm not going to bother making
arguments (Paul Boddie et al has done a much better job than I could),
but I wanted to register my disagreement as someone who generally prefers
Apache-style licenses.  I will just add that I believe that Apache-style
licensing could not work in the absence of GPL software.  IOW, I believe
that GPL confers a form of herd immunity to Open Source in general, and
Stallman gets full credit for creating the idea of GPL to protect Open
Source.

I believe that Stallman understands this perfectly well and it in part
represents why he is so opposed to non-GPL licensing; it makes sense that
he feels some resentment toward the "freeloading" from the rest of the
Open Source community.  OTOH, I also believe that having only GPL would
destroy Open Source as a viable development environment and community;
it's too restrictive for some very valuable projects (including Python in
specific, to bring this back on topic).

Each project needs to think carefully about its relationship to the Open
Source ecosystem and community before deciding on a license.  But for
small projects trying to get users, defaulting to Apache makes sense.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx prgrmmng.